Comments on: Why Forrester Made The Right Call About Employee Blogs

By: Augie Ray

Augie Ray — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:51:06 +0000

I appreciate your unique views into this situation. As a new Forresterite AND an active blogger, I’ve been interested (but not surprised) at the reaction to the news of Forrester’s plans and policies. It’s good to see a smart assessment from the client side of our business. Thanks!

By: Nigel Fenwick

Nigel Fenwick — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:44:32 +0000

Tom,
I’d say your insight is spot-on. Thank you.
Nigel
(FYI – I posted my Forrester analyst take tonight – http://bit.ly/bzTlcL)

By: Dave Doolin

Dave Doolin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:26:41 +0000

Very cool that this is an issue, for many reasons:

1. Analysts are very rightly concerned about their future post-Forrester. Branding themselves independently is just good business for themselves. I never did this. I regret it.

2. It’s not that hard to write on your general topic area without going into any details at all. A good friend of mine works for an unnamed state, at an unnamed agency, doing unnamed work as a civil engineer. He blogs about civil engineering in the large. It’s bulletproof. He keeps his personal data (resume, etc.) locked down on LinkedIn.

There really shouldn’t be an issue here, but it’s very good to see it discussed.

By: fbaud

fbaud — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:52:26 +0000

Actually, in my case, I will most probably attribute credibility to an analyst because of the posts I’ve read, or because I’m following them on Twitter. At this point in time, I’ll probably have to tell executives in my company that they are working at Forrester to give them instant credibility. But that won’t last and executives may accept in a not-too-distant future some sort of TrustMetrics created by some social media company.

Which leads us to “why would we still need Forrester, if they are not valued for the screening in hiring their talents?”. I think that we would value Forrester to provide us with an easy access to these talents, avoiding haggling over fees, and assuring continuity on the relationship with a pool of bright experts.

By: Tom Webster

Tom Webster — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:37:58 +0000

I totally get the first bit–there is no question that Forrester’s business model was based on scarcity of information, and the Internet threw a monkey wrench in that! As for accessing top analysts, again to me it comes down to why you give that analyst credibility–much of their credibility is based upon how they built upon Forrester’s proprietary IP. It’s hard to separate personal brand from that. But it isn’t a black-and-white issue, by any means.

Still, it’s a bit alarming to read all the tweets today that are short-handing this issue to “Forrester bans personal blogs!” There are plenty of smart things Forrester analysts can blog about on their own properties. The ones who are smart about their personal brands will do just that.

By: fbaud

fbaud — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:27:53 +0000

Tom,

Actually, I don’t think we pay to know things before others, we pay: 1) either to save our own time doing the investigations 2) more importantly perhabs, to get an external source on subjects that tend often to become political.

In this particular case, I don’t think Forrester made the right decision for us, the customers. We want to have access to structured ideas and bright people. I think that the competitive advantage for the first part (the Content as Forrester says) is diminishing quickly because we have less and less time to read these reports because of all the time spent reading public blogs. For the second part (accessing top-analysts that can listen to our problems and offer quickly frameworks to structure our reflexion), we are definitely still in high demand for this kind of service – at a reasonable price of course.

By: Tom Webster

Tom Webster — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:08:51 +0000

Thanks, Josh. “Balance” is exactly the right word, because it is all too easy to see this from a populist perspective. Forrester made a tough call here–it isn’t black and white, by any means–but I don’t see that you had a choice, really.

By: Josh Bernoff

Josh Bernoff — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:46:13 +0000

Wow. Well reasoned and from a research expert, to boot. Thanks so much for this perspective, I’m pleased to see some balance in the discussion from an actual paying client.